It has been a long time since I have updated this blog. Yes, the expected response is true. Life happened, I’ve been dealing with a lot, etc etc blah blah blah.  Truth is that what really caused me to stop writing is the same thing that caused me to create this site. It was that night 3 and a half years ago. 

A lot of people say that when they lose someone they love they changed. In reality, when you lose someone, you BEGIN to change, but the process to complete that metamorphosis takes more than a day.. a week.. or even a year. Prior to my wife passing, I did not write many long social media posts, I didn’t even read anyone’s blog, I had not concern about death , and I attended church a couple of times a year as an obligation. After she passed I started on a journey that brought me from losing my faith, relying on mediums, worrying about tings like getting my will in order, starting a blog, and last year, started an in person grief support group here in south eastern Massachusetts. I went from visiting church a couple times a year to attending service multiple times a week and studying the Bible regularly throughout the week.

Still though, after all of these changes, I have not yet changed. I’m still CHANGING. I was talking with someone a few days ago about this and I said, ” 3 years ago I was forced to be introduced to the new me, and I still am learning exactly WHO that person is”. You don’t just become a new person. I think this is one of the things that makes grieving so difficult, as when you talk to someone a few months into grief they often ask, “When does this get any better?”. The typical, and correct response is “It takes time”. The problem is that as humans we tend to find ways to be patient with others but it’s often difficult to be patient with yourself. We want to feel better, we want the pain to end, we want to be who we were, but the fact is that we cant just make that happen with a discussion or with a good night sleep. It takes time.

This raises another problem. While we are working our way through grief, and trying to re-establish who we will become through this life altering change, we can easily get distraught and scared about the thought that we don’t know who we are right now. Our routines are different or gone altogether. Our loved ones we lost arent here for support. Often losing a family member requires other life changes like moving to a new home, taking on a new job, needing to find child care, etc. All of these things have a grieving person asking, “WHO AM I?” and “WHERE DO I FIT IN?”.

My personal experience with this was that I felt like I went from being the person I was to now being the widower. That was my title. Its who I needed to be. It was my 24/7 job and my uniform was exhaustion, grim expressions, and tears. After months of learning to accept this “title”, it became normal to feel sad and cry daily. It was simple. I am now a widower and widowers are sad and depressed. This was all true. What was not true is that “widower” is not my title, nor should it be yours. My true titles that never changed was dad, son, brother, uncle, cousin, friend. Widower is not a title, its a description. Over that first year of grieving, I allowed it to become my title.

As you commit to working on yourself and exploring your thoughts and emotions, whether that be through therapy, counseling, writing, painting, etc., you begin to  take steps in your metamorphosis. You start to truly change. Things start to get clearer and one day you realize you didn’t cry that day and you accept it. For 6 months I cried at least once every single day. If the day was almost over and I realized I had not cried, Id just think back to happy thoughts and old memories that would conjure up tears so that I could get get to that place of comfort I now thought was where I needed to be. When you grieve so passionately for an extended amount of time, it becomes your new reality. You no longer go to bed at night expecting tomorrow to be ok when you know your loved one is gone. You assume the next day will be sad, depressing, maybe unbearable, so when you awake the next morning it becomes time to fulfill that prophecy. You step into your “title” as widow or widower.

I was speaking about this with someone this week and they said they are struggling not knowing who they are anymore or what life’s supposed to be about. They lost their spouse 5 months ago and they are scared that they don’t know how to live this new version of life. Fortunately, God gave me the words to say, “If it takes God 9 months to create a new life inside a woman’s womb, how do you expect to do it in 5 months?”. Just like we try to be patient with our children, our parents, our siblings, and our co workers, we need to learn to be patient with ourselves. Do not get me wrong. It took a while for me to see things in this light. If you go back to my first ever blog post, youll see the difference in how I think now to then.

Through grief I had spent so much time focused on trying to find the answers about death. The WHYs about death. The shift started to happen for me when I dove back into my faith and focused on the WHYS to LIFE. For me my faith was the catalyst, but maybe for you it will be something different. Another great help was connecting with others who also were grieving someone they loved. When I created my Facebook Group, Rewriting Myself, it allowed me to connect with others who also were looking for answers and an easier way to cope with the death of a loved one. If we focus on death and all things related, the we reap what we sow and our spirit, our desires, our imaginations all die too. When we can focus on life, and the whys and how to living better, then we can start to get closer to coming out of our cocoon as a new creation.

It takes time, but it does not need to take forever.